Water, Toast
Ingredients
Directions
Make the toast
Toast the stale bread until quite brown.
Steep and serve
Pour the boiling water over the toasted bread.
Let it stand for 10 minutes.
Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.
Season with coarse sea salt to taste.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Stale bread
- Toasted bread gives browned, toasty flavour to the water as it steeps.
- Boiling water
- Extracts flavour and aroma from the toasted bread, becoming the broth itself.
The step that matters
Toasting the bread until quite brown. Toasting browns the bread through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, creating the roasted flavour that carries into the water. Pale toast gives a bland result.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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